L’Ingénieur von Satanas by Albert Robida (1848-1926), here translated as The Engineer von Satanas, was originally published in Paris by La Renaissance du Livre, with a copyright date of 1919. It is, in one sense, a radical break from the series of novelistic images of the 20th century that the author had published previously, but there is another sense in which it completes a peculiar trilogy introduced by the two shortest items in the earlier series, both entitled “La Guerre au vingtième siècle,” and both translated here, by way of introduction to the present text, as “War in the Twentieth Century.”
The first of the two versions of “La Guerre au vingtième siècle” that Robida published appeared in the 27 October 1883 issue of the magazine he edited, La Caricature. The second version, which accompanied a different set of illustrations, was published as a book by Georges Decaux in 1887; a facsimile of that edition was issued in 1991 by Jules Tallandier, who had inherited the address from which Decaux had operated. The inclusion of the two stories here as a preface to L’Ingénieur von Satanas illustrates the origin of some of the ideas that he redeveloped in the latter text, and the manner in which, although the detail of his anticipations had only been slightly modified to take aboard the innovations of the previous thirty years, his attitude to the prospects in question had shifted sufficiently to replace a tone of wry black comedy with one of furiously bitter criticism.
I have also included two stories by other hands as appendices to Robida’s novel, both of which illustrate similarly proximate imaginative reactions to the Great War, and which have marked affinities with Robida’s work in spite of very considerable differences of narrative method. The first of them, “De la pluie qui surprit Candide en son jardin et d’un entretien qu’il eut avec divers personnages” by the poet Adrien Bertrand (1888-1917), here translated as “The Rain that Surprised Candide in his Garden” [omitting “and a conversation he had with various people”] appeared in a collection of four stories, all written while the author was dying, entitled L’Orage sur le jardin de Candide, romans philosophiques [The Storm over Candide’s Garden; philosophical fictions], published by Calmann-Lévy in 1917. The second, Comment Paris a été détruit en six heures le 20 avril 1924 (le jour de Pâques) by the journalist Louis Baudry de Saunier (1865-1938), here translated as “How Paris was Destroyed in Six Hours,” [omitting “on Easter Sunday, 24 April 1924”] was originally published as a pamphlet by Ernest Flammarion in 1924.
The 1883 and 1887 stories of 20th century warfare were not the first such images that Albert Robida had produced. In the course of his long chronicle of the Voyages très extraordinaires de Saturnin Farandoul dans les 5 ou 6 parties du monde et dans tous les pays connus et meme inconnus de M. Jules Verne (1879)1, each of whose five parts takes up where one of Jules Verne’s novels left off, in the interests of parodic exaggeration, Saturnin Farandoul and Phileas Fogg end up on opposite sides in an intense war fought in America between the North and South of the Disunited States of Nicaragua, in which heavily armored “locomotives of war” (i.e., giant tanks) mount fearsome charges, gigantic cannons launch unprecedentedly powerful shells, “submarine cavalry” mount a daring raid to capture the transatlantic cable, and chloroform bombs play a crucial role, before the climactic battle takes place between two fleets of war-balloons.
Many of these images crop up again in the 1883 version of “La Guerre au vingtième siècle,” which is mostly set in Africa, partly as a joke about the potential future of colonies that become independent go-ahead “young nations,” and partly in order to distance its slaughter from Europe. The story is set in 1875, twenty-five years after the main action that Robida had developed in his massive satiric account of Le Vingtième siècle (1883), which was in press when the story in La Caricature was published and was heavily advertized in the subsequent issues of the periodical, so it could not have disrupted the imaginary history of the novel, but it nevertheless leaves the society described therein untouched. The casualty figures cited in the story are horrific, but by no means world-destructive, and only affect the “young” nations—the bark rather than the heartwood of the envisaged world civilization.
Unfortunately, the account of the Australo-Mozambiquan war of 1975 is incomplete, because of the very strict space limitations of La Caricature, in which only four pages could be devoted primarily to text, and even they carried two or three illustrations each, in addition to those included in a special pictorial pull-out section. The later phases of the story are drastically abridged, either cut down from a longer text in order to fit, or, more likely, written while the typesetting was in progress, under enormous pressure from the rapidly-shrinking available space. It would undoubtedly have been a better story had Robida had more scope to develop it, and might well have featured even more speculative materiel. Four years later, however, when the second version of La Guerre au vingtième siècle appeared, in a format that was much generous in terms of available space, the author elected to fill the extra space with more elaborate illustrations; the text is only a thousand words longer than the text of the earlier story, although it extends over forty-two pages, and the conclusion is only slightly less clipped.
The second version is set mostly in Europe, and is specifically dated 1945, five years earlier than the main action of Le Vingtième siècle, but it is equally careful not to disrupt the history of continuous progress set out in the definitive novel. All the images of mechanical and chemical warfare featured in the earlier version are deployed again, but there is also the key addition of an “Offensive Medical Corps” dedicated to biological warfare, as well as the less fortunate addition of military mediums deploying Mesmeric “fluid.” Like all the other devices, however, the Offensive Medical Corps is used in a farcical spirit, in spite of the devastatingly murderous effects credited to it, and the list of diseases developed as weapons by the Offensive Medical Corps of the short story makes an interesting contrast with the nastier list credited to the Offensive Medical Corps of L’Ingénieur von Satanas. The 1887 story also alters the narrative strategy of the 1883 version, reducing the narrative distance between narrator and reader by liking its narrative viewpoint more closely to the consciousness of the hero.
The Offensive Medical Corps appeared again, in a marginal role, in Robida’s sequel to La Vingtième siècle, La Vie électrique (1892)2, whose hero is a reservist in the Chemical Artillery, called up in the course of the plot to take part in elaborate training maneuvers simulating a hypothetical invasion, while his father is an industrialist whose factory is working on new development in the weaponization of diseases. Much more attention is paid in the description of the hypothetical battle featured in the plot to the tactics of deployment of chemical and biological warfare than in two short stories, but the fact that the battle and its hypothetical casualty figures are unreal blunts the imagined horror considerably, and does not interfere unduly with the hectic comedy of the plot, the main satirical targets of which are the overly stressful pace and excessive complication of technological civilization.
The enemy nation with which France goes to war in the 1887 version of La Guerre au vingtième siècle is carefully unnamed, although the description of crossing the border between the two leaves little doubt that it is Germany—a diplomacy that contrasts strongly with L’Ingénieur von Satanas, written immediately after four years of the Great War and understandably replete with angry anti-German rants. The principal different between the earlier texts and the later one, however, is not the sudden flowering of a blame culture but the replacement of a farcical tone that is relatively breezy with a profound and sincerely embittered grimness—a shift greatly assisted by a further decrease in narrative distance, by the employment of a narrative strategy that takes the reader into the consciousness of the first-person narrator, to eavesdrop on his thoughts and dreams as well as following the development of his realization of the situation he discovers in Europe in 1929, after fifteen years of absence, stranded in the vicinity of the North Pole. Indeed, the narrative distance becomes so close that the temporal standpoint of the narrative voice frequently becomes confused.
The most interesting thing about the shift between the 1887 and 1919 accounts of twentieth-century warfare, however, is that it was not produced by any new awareness of military possibility; although the novel calls a tank a tank instead of a “locomotive of war” and makes its “airborne commandos” heavier-than-air craft instead of miniaturized souped-up dirigibles, there is nothing in the military technology of its image of warfare in 1929 that had not featured in the author’s earlier images of war in 1975 and 1945. What had crucially changed, as a result of the experience of the actual war of 1914-18, was Robida’s realization that that he had been more accurate in his anticipations than he had supposed, and far more than he had wanted to suppose.
We now have the privilege of looking back from a viewpoint considerably beyond any of the dates cited in Robida’s accounts of hypothetical twentieth-century warfare and civilization, and we can see that so far as events are concerned, his score as a prophet is zero, exactly similar to the score of every other prophet throughout history (except, of course, that who made “prophesies” after the fact and falsified the dates). If, however, we consider anxieties rather than actual events, we can see that Robida was a very remarkable and far-sighted prophet indeed, not only because he anticipated fears about chemical and biological warfare in the 1880s, but because he anticipated in 1919 fears that were to become central to British scientific romance in the 1930s and an important subschema of American science fiction in the 1950s. In that respect, L’Ingénieur von Satanas, which was not much liked at the time, because it made exceedingly uncomfortable reading in 1919, and was almost forgotten thereafter, is most definitely a classic of futuristic fiction, ten or thirty years “ahead of its time”—depending on whether one uses British or American units of measurement—and whose “time” is not yet over, because the threat that it describes still exists and still serves as a significant motor of anxiety.
In fact, British writers were not slow on the uptake with regard to the revelations of the Great War, and Edward Shanks’s The People of the Ruins (1920) and Cicely Hamilton’s Theodore Savage (1922) both produced similar imagery within a couple of years of Robida’s text. There was then a steady trickle of such works throughout the 1920s, before the boom in such text in the 1930s elevated the imagery in question to the dominant note of scientific romance in that decade. That interim was occasioned by the fact that Robida’s anticipation of a resurgence of German militarism was delayed in the real world until Adolf Hitler made the threat painfully obvious. With the aid of hindsight, however, we can see that, although Robida’s timetable was inaccurate, his conviction that the armistice of 1918 had not ended the Great War at all, but merely postponed its resumption, was fundamentally correct.
Consideration of that fact also helps to explain one of the fundamental differences between the French genre of roman scientifique, the British genre of scientific romance and the American genre initially called “scientifiction” and subsequently renamed science fiction. The U.S.A. was immune for a long time to the anxieties prevalent in European varieties of speculative fiction because the Atlantic and Pacific oceans seemed to place it well out of range of the kinds of saturation bombardment that might destroy civilization. That kind of anxiety only provoked very weak echoes in American science fiction of the dominant note of British scientific romance in the 1930s, thus liberating the sciencefictional imagination to see the future largely in terms of a new phase of American colonialism that would replace the once-Wild West, now comprehensively domesticated, with the “final frontier” of space.
For that reason, while apocalyptic future warfare was the dominant note of British scientific romance in the period between the two worlds wars, it played such a minor role in American science fiction that even when the USA revealed the superweapon that opened up its own vulnerability to annihilation in 1945, the anxieties stimulated by that revelation had such a long way to travel that it was only gradually, over a period of a further forty years, that anxiety gained the upper hand over soaring optimism in American futuristic fiction—which had, in the meantime, colonized European literary marketplaces so successfully that French and British science fiction overwhelmed, overtook and displaced the native traditions in the meantime, albeit always retaining a much more noticeable alarmist undertone.
Within that historical pattern, L’Ingénieur von Satanas is, if not a pivotal work, at least a work that posted a very significant flag of discovery, marking a magnetic pole toward which many future imaginative travelers were to navigate. Because it was the first to reach that pole, it shows certain elements of naivety, but it also shows certain elements of raw pain that could only be dulled by repetition and revisitation. Those are stark, both in terms of telling details of the circumstances in which the survivors of the holocaust live, but also in the novel’s conclusion, not so much in the character of the deus ex machina that provides the plot with the sense of an ending but in the true, unrecorded climax that is carefully left beyond the end of the text. That deliberate exclusion, which might seem perverse to some readers, was partly calculated to make the enormity of the “final solution” to the problem of “Prussianism” more appreciable by suggestion than it could have been by illustration, and partly in order that, in spite of the horrendous casualty figures implied by the story, the score of deaths actually described within it remains a highly conscientious and somewhat contrived zero.
As noted above, the primary reason for including two further stories in the present volume is to illustrate other close-range reactions to the Great War by French writers who found imaginative fiction an appropriate medium for dramatizing their anxieties. Adrien Bertrand was one of the earliest casualties of the war, in which he volunteered to fight as soon as the Germans invaded, even though he was a committed pacifist who had been active for some years in promoting that cause as a journalist. He went straight from cursory basic training into the front line, where, two months later, in October 1914, shrapnel from a shell-burst penetrated his chest and damaged his lungs. The injury was mortal, and there was no prospect of a recovery, but its lethal effects were not swift, and it took him a little over three years actually to die, confined to bed the entire time. As a poet and journalist by vocation, he naturally used that interval of agony to write, and won the Prix Goncourt in 1916 for his one and only novel, L’Appel du sol, which describes the horrific experiences of a group of soldiers during the early months of the war. Thereafter, he only wrote short stories, probably because he had no confidence that he could finish any long work that he started.
The story included here is the longest of the four that he completed, and by far the most far-ranging in its method and ambition. A conte philosophique in the very heart of the Voltairean tradition, it introduces the hero of L’Appel du Sol, recreated immortal after his death from wounds sustained in battle, to a group of other immortals—archetypal literary characters rather than real historical individuals—in order that they can discuss the significance in human affairs of war in general and the Great War in particular. If the argument seems a little slight and abbreviated in places, that is surely forgivable as well as understandable, but the story is by no means a work that is only remarkable for having been done at all; it is done well, with plenty of red meat for mental nutrition, and its conversations make a interesting surreal comparison with the exemplary conversations on the same theme that Robida’s narrator has with Dr. Christiansen and Jollimay.
Like Adrien Bertrand, Louis Baudry de Saunier was a journalist, but whereas Bertrand was a socialist and pacifist whose writings were primarily political, although they clearly reflected the fact that he was a poet too, Baudry de Saunier’s career was shaped by his passion for the bicycle, and he became a prolific writer on the rapid development of that technology and the sport associated with it in the early 1890s. From there it was a very short step to tracking the development of automobile technology and its associated sport, and from there to take in aviation and the development of flying as a pioneering and sporting endeavor. During the Great War he expanded his fascination to take in artillery technology and wireless technology, and afterwards such topics as the various potential uses of electricity and aluminum, thus remaining one of the leading popularizers of new technology of his era. He only wrote one work of fiction, which arose, like L’Ingénieur von Satanas, from the conviction that the armistice of 1918 had not really ended the war, but had merely postponed its continuation, similarly with the supplementary conviction that when it did recommence, it would do so even more destructively.
The most interesting element of Baudry de Saunier’s story, however, is not what it has in common with Robida’s but the dramatic contrast in its narrative method, which, far from looking at “Prussianism” from a horrified distance, adopts the strategy of looking at, no less disapprovingly, it from the inside. Like Robida, Baudry de Saunier sets out to produce a striking image of the symbolic “ingénieur von Satanas,” but attempts to make it even more striking by allowing him to tell his own story, in a long diabolical gloat. In terms of his nationality, of course, that figure is now hopelessly out of date, but in terms of his profession, he is still very much alive as a bugbear, and as scary as ever, Nowadays, he is a “genetic engineer” attached to the Offensive Medical Corps rather than the aviator that Baudry de Saunier elects to make him, but the fundamental principle remains the same, and twentieth-century versions of Robida’s Dr. Christiansen do not have to modify the good doctor’s fundamental argument regarding “that slut Science” at all.
Unlike Robida’s narrator, of course, modern readers are unlikely to be so easily converted to Dr. Christiansen’s point of view; the century that has elapsed since the Great War has made us, in spite of our anxieties, somewhat more complacent than Robida or Baudry de Saunier felt entitled to be in its immediate aftermath. We are far more likely to side with the valiant dead-but-immortal heroes of Adrien Bertrand’s story, determined in their hope that life can and will go on, and that Candide’s symbolic garden can be replanted, if only we can all pitch in, like Mr. Pickwick, Faust and Achilles. There is, after all, no alternative. Wherever we might stand intellectually, however, there is no doubt of the continuing relevance, in the twenty-first century, of the five texts in this volume. Their juxtaposition increases that relevance synergistically. In term of their anxieties, they were ahead of their time, but in terms of provoking thought, they have only become more urgent.
This translation of L’Ingénieur von Satanas was made from a photocopy of the Renaissance du Livre edition made by Jean-Marc Lofficier from a copy of the book supplied by Marc Madouraud. I am very grateful to both of them for enabling me to translate an exceedingly rare text of particular interest.
The translation of the 1883 version of “La Guerre au vingtième siècle” was made from the copy of the 27 October 1883 issue of La Caricature reproduced on the Bibliothèque Nationale’s gallica website.
The translation of the 1887 version was made from a copy of the 1991 Tallandier reprint of the book. The translation of “De la pluie qui surprit Candide en son jardin et d’un entretien qu’il eut avec divers personnages” was made from the copy of the Calmann-Levy edition of L’Orage sur le jardin de Candide, romans philosophiques made available by the University of Toronto to the Internet Archive Digital Library at archive.org.
The translation of Comment Paris a été détruit en six heures le 20 avril 1924 (le jour de Pâques) was made from the copy of the Flammarion edition reproduced on gallica.
Brian Stableford